My last column discussed the intersection between Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and where things might be heading. The question for this column is can I (Bob Cringely) be replaced by a machine?

Look below the fold on any news site except this one and you’ll see ads that look like news stories but aren’t: “One Weird Trick to Grow Extra Toes!,” or “The 53 Hottest Ukrainian Grandmothers!” I’m waiting for “One Weird Trick to Becoming a Hot Ukrainian Grandmother with Extra Toes!” Read the stories and they are total crap, that is unless you have a fetish for Ukrainian Grandmas… or toes. They are all about getting us to click […]

With today’s introduction of Apple’s iPad 3 or iPad HD or whatever the hell they end up calling it, I think we’ll be entering a pretty Siri-ous phase when it comes to mobile Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Apple has a winner in Siri, its iOS digital assistant app, and knows it, so we’ll soon be seeing all-Siri, all the time in Apple products to come this year including, no doubt, Cupertino’s own big-screen TV. But this is not to say that Google’s Android will be far behind. There are stories popping-up about Google doing its own Siri-like app. But I expect Google to go significantly beyond Siri capability and I base that belief […]

The heyday of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in the 1970s and 1980s. Here was the logical evolution of office and industrial automation that would put an expert into every computer and by doing so both replace and augment employees, changing forever the world of work. Only it turned out not to function that way because we underestimated the effort involved. It was easy to imagine putting intelligence into a computer but very difficult to do so in practice. There wasn’t enough processing power available for one thing, nor were there even enough experts, since it seemed to require having one on-hand to keep the machine in […]